Speech Therapy in Atlanta, Sandy Springs and Dunwoody, GA. Speak to a Pediatric Speech Therapist Now
We have BUCKETS in our Brain???
Our team of SLP’s at SAGE Speech & Learning specializes in language and processing impairments. We would love to work with you and your child to help your child meet their potential!
Over the course of many, many snow days this month my kids overheard a number of my strange work conversations. One that stood out to my 6 year old involved buckets…in our brains!! At bedtime one night, she asked me “Mommy, how do buckets get in our brains?”
When I am explaining vocabulary, language, and retrieval to parents of children with language impairments, I often make this simplified visual for them. Our brains may contain “buckets” for categories such as animals (farm, ocean, pets, wild, jungle, etc) or Foods (vegetable, fruit, meat, drinks, etc). When a word is learned we place it into the correct “bucket.” When we need to retrieve that word, we go to the appropriate bucket, pull it out, and say it! It seems to easy.
But, for children with receptive and expressive language impairments, parts of this learning, memory and retrieval process can breakdown. If their input system is not placing the new word into the correct bucket, if it is falling out of a bucket, or is straddling two buckets, the child often will have trouble retrieving that word quickly and/or accurately. Often children who have this difficulty will be described as having a “mixed receptive/expressive language disorder.”
Sometimes, parents will tell me that they KNOW their child knows this word. Or they KNOW their child has a strong understanding of language, but they just aren’t showing it! Or they only speak in 1-2 word phrases and not long sentences yet. Many professionals believe that an expressive language delay cannot exist without a receptive delay. Many times these children DO show delays in understanding on standardized tests, despite reports of understanding their surroundings.
Our job as speech language pathologists is to find the best way for each child to learn, store and retrieve the words and ideas they are exposed to, then, to help those children express their words and ideas quickly and effectively!
Our team of SLP’s at SAGE Speech & Learning specializes in language and processing impairments. We would love to work with you and your child to help your child meet their potential!
Sage Speech & Learning Associates offer professional speech therapy, language therapy and feeding therapy in Atlanta, Brookhaven, Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, Buckhead and surrounding areas.
